It is these countries plagued by near-constant political and economic instability that are often the ones most in need of private investment. Yet they are also the places few private investors are willing to go. The risks seem to outweigh the rewards.

Just ask the investors: businesses in emerging markets can no longer afford to ignore the risks posed by the changing climate to their bottom lines. Ranging from increasingly frequent and severe weather events to new regulations and changing consumer preferences, climate change is fundamentally transforming the way we do business. Increasingly, companies and their investors are seeking opportunities to transition to and invest in climate-smart portfolios.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) require the coordination of an impressive number of stakeholders to mobilize the commercial financing needed to achieve sustainable, inclusive growth in challenging environments. A great deal of analysis, negotiation, and hard work goes into every project. And each one presents an opportunity to encourage investors to venture into countries and compete for projects they wouldn’t have considered before and, ultimately, to create new markets.

While the commercial and legal challenges involved in structuring PPPs are well known, the efforts that go into conducting rigorous technical due diligence are less well known. For example, projects that aim to provide utility scale solar PV on short order, like the World Bank Group’s Scaling Solar program, require a team of experienced engineers from IFC’s Energy and Water Advisory working hand in hand with our PPP transaction advisors, legal experts, and environmental and social specialists to make them a reality.

There is a famous saying that a successful person can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

In real life however, the art of building a firm foundation is not always that simple. Waiting for others to simply throw bricks at you is not enough when the grand task is transforming infrastructure into an asset class. There is a need for a skillful bricklayer—and this is the role we see for the multilateral development banks (MDBs).

Editor's Note: Join us April 22nd at 10AM ET for the 2017 Global Infrastructure Forum when the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), the United Nations, the G-20, and development partners from around the world meet to discuss opportunities to harness public and private resources to improve infrastructure worldwide, and to ensure that investments are environmentally, social and economically sustainable. Check out the event site to view the livestream on April 22.

Imagine the difficulty of designing, financing, building and operating a €360 million, 1,000-bed hospital campus that serves a region of 1.6 million people? This is exactly what the government of Turkey is doing in Elaziğ, a city of 350,000 in eastern Anatolia. The facility will serve and accommodate about 20,000 patients and their relatives per day with a broad range of services including women and children’s health, psychiatric services, and a dental clinic.

A project of this size is bound to be challenging and complex. But the approach taken by the Turkish Government has been a success—to involve a private-sector partner through a public-private partnership (PPP) with support from multilateral development banks. How did they do it?

Editor's Note: Join us April 22nd at 10AM ET for the 2017 Global Infrastructure Forum when the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), the United Nations, the G-20, and development partners from around the world meet to discuss opportunities to harness public and private resources to improve infrastructure worldwide, and to ensure that investments are environmentally, social and economically sustainable. Check out the event site to view the livestream on April 22.

Public-private partnership (PPP) practitioners are sometimes guilty of thinking that signing the deal is the end of the story. You can’t blame them, really. Making a PPP work is a long-term process with a lot of players involved, each with his or her own priorities. Detailed technical, economic, and environmental and social reviews must be conducted to make sure the project is feasible and bankable. Often, sector reforms are required. Stakeholders – including the public – must be kept fully informed. The competitive bid, critical to any PPP, must be fully transparent so nobody will doubt the legitimacy of the outcome. It’s a long, hard slog to the end, and I can’t blame PPP practitioners from wearily planting the flag, declaring victory, and moving on.

But the signing is not the end; it is the beginning. And you can’t really declare success until the PPP is delivering real results for people. Sometimes, a follow-up PPP adds a new phase to a project, and sometimes new players are brought in. In any case, it’s worth going back and examining the results of PPP projects to see what happened and extract valuable lessons.

Ethiopia, the single largest African coffee producer and the world’s fifth largest, is commonly considered to be the birthplace of coffee. It’s hardly a surprise that when you survey the landscape of Ethiopia’s Oromia region, an area the size of Italy, it is bespeckled with native Coffea arabica farms.

I recently had the chance to get to know dozens of forward-thinking, dynamic individuals from the public and private sectors. Despite their varied backgrounds, resumes, and perspectives, they shared one thing in common: they have all been influential in shaping the Asia Pacific PPP landscape. Our gathering was part of the IFC PPP Transaction Advisory Services Unit’s four-day Senior Training Program on PPPs and Project Finance, in collaboration with the Harvard Kennedy School in Singapore.

All of the participants – government representatives, donors, private sector clients, World Bank and MIGA staff, as well as senior IFC staff -- offered a different view on how best to combat today’s global PPP challenges. We captured a few key insights from the training program to share with others: